Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not

by Sequeira, Christopher;

  Hours passed during which I suffered the torments of a very airless Hades. There was no respite from my struggles. No breath of air seemed cool enough or fresh enough to do me any good. Nor could I gain sufficient oxygen to appease my ravenous needs.

  I had closely observed these early symptoms in others, and as the morning progressed, they worsened. I could feel the pneumonia clutching at my struggling lungs like a tropical python wrapping its inexorable coils around my heaving ribs.

  I do not recall how long I tossed and turned, trapped in a body consumed by rebellion against the virus which had invad­ed it. But I fear I was not strong enough to withstand and stave off the inevitable for as long as Dr West had predicted.

  It was sometime in mid-afternoon that awareness fled, and I entered a blackness that seemed then to be irredeemably absolute.

  When consciousness returned, I was astounded to discover that it was morning. I sat up in bed, and found myself alone. The door was wide open. My first sensation was that my lungs were heaving with fluid, and I began coughing, expelling their contents in wave after wave of torrential fluid.

  This ugly chore left me racked and depleted; then I found that I could breathe more normally.

  Fumbling for the servant’s bell, I tried to ring it. My strength all but failed me. The noisy device fell to the floor, making a discordant clatter. This brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr West immediately.

  “How are you feeling, old man?” asked Holmes in a solicitous tone.

  “Beastly,” I replied frankly, my cough returning, but without its former violence.

  “You look all in,” agreed Holmes, nodding.

  Dr West had been a silent witness to this brief exchange, but now he spoke.

  “You succumbed more rapidly than I expected,” he said rather clinically. “It was difficult to determine when to inject you, but evidently my timing was impeccable.”

  To which Holmes added, with a trace of competitive spirit, “I hasten to add that I was consulted in the matter of timing, and my will ultimately prevailed.”

  A flash of something like anger crossed Dr West’s pale features, but he held his quick tongue.

  “What matters is that you have been preserved from one of the most lethal scourges ever to strike mankind,” said Holmes.

  I struggled with my words, my brain rather fagged from my ordeal. “Did I…expire?”

  Sherlock Holmes and Dr West exchanged acute glances, neither man seemed willing to offer a firm opinion.

  Instead, Holmes asked, rather pointedly I thought, “What do you recall of your most recent slumber?”

  I had not given the matter any thought heretofore, as I readily admitted. Searching my memories, I offered, “I recall vaguely strangling in my sleep, then a warm blackness, followed by the most inchoate dreams.”

  “These dreams,” probed Holmes. “Kindly enlighten us as to their exact nature.”

  I struggled to assemble my words. “They were rather kaleidoscopic, and I can derive very little meaning from them, except that I felt as if I was wandering through what might best be described as a maze composed of my own past recollections. My entire life, as it were, began unreeling before my eyes as though a motion picture were playing haphazardly.”

  “I see,” mused Holmes. He grew very thoughtful of count­enance.

  Dr West regarded him speculatively. “Dr Watson may well have been reliving his life on earth, which he now remembers imperfectly, owing to his difficult translation from this world to the next and then back again.”

  “Both are rank speculation,” retorted Holmes. “The facts as presented to us do not perfectly fit your theory as broached.”

  “They do not contradict it!” retorted the American, rather forcefully for a guest in another man’s home, I thought.

  After a pause, Holmes said reluctantly, “No, they do not precisely contradict it. They fit only in the manner that sackcloth fits a man’s form—in a rather makeshift way.”

  “I do not see Watson’s dream memories as cheap sackcloth,” countered West rather darkly. “Perhaps as a shroud, which I have helped him cast off.”

  “Perhaps,” allowed Holmes. “Perhaps.”

  I did not personally care for the trend of this conversation, and made to sit up on the edge of the bed, asking in the most polite tone I could muster, “Would a spot of tea be too much to ask for a man who has been brought back from the brink of eternity?”

  This seemed to snap the two intellects out of their verbal con­flict, for Holmes immediately called down for tea, as well as toast and eggs.

  I consumed this unsurpassed breakfast in my bed, as a wolf might devour the chicken. Sherlock Holmes and Dr West left me to my repast, and were gone over an hour. Their arguing voices beat against the closed bedroom door, but I could make out none of it.

  When the two men returned, they gave me a thorough exam­ination, with Dr West taking the part of the attending physician, and Sherlock Holmes that of a clinician studying a rare case. They traded observations, contradicted one another at different points, agreed on others, and came away of one mind.

  “Watson, I congratulate you,” said Sherlock Holmes. “For you may be the first human being in history to recover from the ravages of the Spanish influenza in its latter, terminal stages.”

  I pushed away my plate, and asked in the spirit of honesty, “Are these laurels truly deserved, or do I have others to thank for my resurrection?”

  Dr West seemed on the point of claiming full credit when Sherlock Holmes murmured, “Whenever a patient recovers from an illness, his attending physician must be credited. Yet his own vitality cannot be dismissed from consideration. There is no doubt the Dr West’s alkaloid solution played an immeasurable role in arresting your mortal dissolution. But even at your age, your robust physique cannot be dismissed out of hand.”

  Turning to West, he added solicitously, “Do you not agree, Dr West?”

  “I do not disagree,” snapped the other, refusing to surrender the point entirely.

  “The question as to whether Watson has been truly resurrected or merely reanimated at the brink of his last breath remains an open one, then,” murmured Holmes.

  Dr West said nothing, but his face fumed to the point that I feared that his smouldering blue eyes might ignite. But they did not. Nor did his obvious temper.

  With that, the discussion wandered into fresh and frightening territory. To my utter astonishment, it was Sherlock Holmes who opened up the Pandora’s box of the subject unspoken.

  “Dr West, as I recall yesterday you made me a proposition.”

  “I did,” returned West.

  “Are you still game to go through with the test?”

  “Are you up to the challenge?” countered West.

  “I do not know that I am up or down,” remarked Holmes coolly, “only that I am intrigued by the possibilities.”

  At this point, I was forced to interject, “Whatever are two of you rattling on about?”

  Holmes gave me a thin smile, saying, “Do you not recall Dr West’s kind offer to resurrect me upon my demise, Watson?”

  It all came rushing back to me. The sheer audaciousness would have been difficult to forget. I can only ascribe my failure of memory to my overnight ordeal.

  “Good heavens, Holmes!” I cried aloud, sitting up sharply. “You do not mean to entertain this man’s offer of a scientific resurrection?”

  Holmes had again dug out his pipe, and was puffing away at it. His eyebrows hooded his grey orbs like those of a hawk frowning down upon prey. At length, Sherlock Holmes uttered these unforgettable words. “I fear I am coming to the end of my days; the usefulness of this body is growing thin. Yet for all that, my mind balks at the thought of being extinguished like a common candle. Still, I must face up to facts. I am mortal, as much as any other man.”

  A thin smile cr
ossed the delicate features of Dr West. I knew from the weird light in his eyes that he had Holmes under his scientific sorcerer’s spell. There was nothing I could do about it. Holmes was a man of mental activity. That his body was slowly succumbing to the ravages of age was undeniable. That his brain remained lucid in the face of advancing years was also beyond doubt. I did not often peer into the man’s mind, despite its crystalline clarity. But in that moment, I knew what Sherlock Holmes was thinking. He was a solver of many mysteries. Uncounted crimes had been laid at his table. And he unravelled virtually all. Had age not overtaken him, Holmes would still be about that business. For its fascinations, its appeal to his thirst for intellectual variety, and the manner in which puzzles seized upon his mental machinery, had been his meat and drink. Alas, after a lifetime of such pursuits, he had had more than his fill. His appetite for novelty, as it were, was off.

  To Holmes, only one compelling mystery remained. The riddle of death. The fate of consciousness. The chance, however remote to his way of thinking, of an afterlife. More to the point, Sherlock Holmes was pondering the possibility that while his body would ultimately fail, his mind might persist in some other vessel, or perhaps no vessel at all.

  Standing at the edge of his mortal span, the great Sherlock Holmes keenly wished to know what lay beyond this earthly vale. More than that, he desired to bring that knowledge back to the earth, as if to show mankind one final time that Sherlock Holmes was the greatest the solver of conundrums the world had ever known.

  All this I understood in a flash briefer than a watch-tick.

  “Holmes!” I implored. “This is madness! You cannot subject yourself to this inhuman monster’s experimentations! I forbid it!”

  Dr West favoured me with his jaundiced eye, but Sherlock Holmes looked upon me with a mixture of sympathy and dark humor.

  “I daresay I should be the final judge and arbiter of my own fate,” said Holmes dryly. “Do you not agree, Dr Watson? Should not every man, or any man, be the ultimate decider of such business?”

  “Under ordinary circumstances, of course I would be in complete agreement with you. But you have life yet within you, Holmes, and your years may yet number a score or so.”

  “Perhaps,” allowed Holmes. “But there is something else, a singular fact which you do not yet know.”

  “And what is that?” I demanded.

  “That I am, and have been suffering for the last several months, from a rather difficult progressive disease. My days are numbered, not in years, nor necessarily in months, but in actual fact, mere weeks are left to me.”

  “Say this is not so!”

  “Alas, it is so. And Dr West was good enough to diagnose my present situation, and agrees with my own personal physician. I spared you this awful knowledge, for I knew you were busy with your medical duties at this terrible time. I did not want you wasting a shred of thought or regret on my inevitable fate.”

  I was struck speechless. My mouth worked, but it was filled with dryness, my throat parched by emotion while the tongue in my head felt like an alien organ placed there by some mad surgeon—something not even my own.

  My stricken gaze went back from the faces of these two singular men who had discovered common cause, despite the very different paths they had walked in life. I knew that a solemn compact been made, and once made, brave Holmes would see through to its conclusion, regardless of consequences.

  Thus, I had no other choice but to surrender to his decision.

  There in the room where I had expired—or nearly expired and returned from wherever I had returned from—the three of us entered into a rather grim understanding.

  We would remain with Sherlock Holmes until the end came, and then we would attend to his transition, and if practicable, his resurrection. During that period, Holmes would apply his considerable knowledge of chemistry and botany to the problem of perfecting Dr West’s unique serum—it having been agreed by all that the dose which had plucked me from the certain jaws of death was not necessarily efficacious in all cases and circumstances.

  Over dinner, the conversation was restrained and limited to the calamitous events that had seized the world. Holmes continued to insist that absolute victory for the Allies was near, and a matter of a few months. No more. I did not doubt him.

  Then, over apple pie, Holmes turned to Dr West and remarked, “Your arrival was timely indeed.”

  “Fateful, at any rate,” concurred West, somehow implying that the mechanisms of Fate were definitely aligned to his fortunes and no other’s.

  I laid down my fork, suddenly losing my appetite in the face of the morbid trend of the dinner talk.

  Holmes remarked suddenly, “I keep bees, Dr West. Do you know that the properties of raw honey have a peculiar restorative quality?”

  West blinked behind his spectacles. “I confess I do not,” he admitted.

  “My thinking is that we might apply some of my apiary knowledge to the problem of your reanimating mixture. Are you familiar with the substance known as royal jelly?”

  West’s blue eyes took on a distinctly intrigued quality.

  “I see that you are,” continued Holmes. “I have long been fascinated by this singular secretion of the honey bee. It is packed with nutrients, and so powerful that when fed to a common bee larva, it transforms the specimen into a queen, thereby insuring the continuation of the hive. All of that may already belong to your storehouse of knowledge. But consider this: certain experiments have shown conclusively that the introduction of the royal jelly nutrients stimulate the growth of glia cells of the brain.”

  A flash of light came into West’s eager eyes.

  “You are suggesting, Mr Holmes, that my revivified subjects have failed to thrive owing to deficiencies in their brain matter?”

  “I do,” admitted Holmes. “As you are well aware, Dr West, the brain is the first organ to putrefy at death. If that highest of organs can be fed the proper nutrients via your serum, this decay might be reversed, and the deceased may well be persuaded to remain among the living far longer than your previous experiments have thus far permitted.”

  I failed to follow it all, but Holmes had the man spellbound, as it were.

  We stayed only five days in the farmhouse of Sherlock Holmes—five days in which I watched the singular man fade away. As if given the sublime opportunity to match his wits against the unknown, he at last willingly released his hold on life.

  All during that difficult passage, Holmes directed Dr West to reformulate his dubious elixir of life time and again, displaying a chemical knowledge that deeply impressed the American experimenter, for Sherlock Holmes, once he had grasped the essential alkaloid formulation, seemed to comprehend it as fully as its creator, and readily identified the weaknesses in its composition. In truth, he had already done so, for both men seemed satisfied by the introduction of a solution of royal jelly into the mixture.

  Much of it was, frankly, beyond me. But the confidence with which the two intellectual giants spoke of the new formulation gave me faint hope.

  By the fourth day, Sherlock Homes was bedridden. There were few outward symptoms of his condition, only a deeper greyness descending over the pale parchment of his face.

  By the morning of the fifth day, the end was near. A persistent rattling emanating from Holmes’ throat told me so. I did what I could, saw that the wasting man was kept well hydrated, but Holmes refused all other nourishment, and his eyes became heavy of lid while his face grew rather spectral and carven, as if composed of bone covered in parchment.

  The stark aspect of the man I once revered grew unpleasant beyond endurance. But I thrust my personal feelings aside, and administrated to him as best I could.

  Dr West took little part in this routine. As before, his interest appeared less about making a sick man well as it was in plumbing the depths of dissolution in the mortal destruction of flesh and bone.


  Holmes began slipping away at the noon hour, which I thought rather odd. He seemed more the type to pass in the night. Perhaps this was due to his often nocturnal habits. But when midday struck, my friend began to fade.

  I called Dr West to the room urgently.

  The American physician had prepared a fresh vial and hypodermic needle and was prepared to do what he had come to do. I thought again how the Fates had conspired to bring these two men together at this dreadful hour, and it seemed to me that the universe showed a greater intelligence and careful planning than men of science gave it credit.

  As the dying man began to breathe his last, Dr West charged the needle, then drove it straight into Holmes’ heart.

  I was shocked by the feral manner in which he did this. It was as if the doctor were mad, and was attempting to destroy life, not protract it.

  Wheezing, Sherlock Holmes gave a convulsive jerk; his fingers began fluttering, features now grey and sere, if already interred.

  West stepped back while I plunged in, seizing Holmes’ wrist, groping for the thready pulse, watching his thin nostrils for signs of the resumption of respiration.

  Timing his pulse by my watch, I began to despair. Then, suddenly I felt a surge pass through that lank body, and the dying pulse began to hammer and hammer as though adrenaline had been introduced into the heart.

  Suddenly, Sherlock Holmes sat straight up, grey eyes flying open, strange gleams in their cloudy depths.

  His magnificent head swivelled about the room, and it seemed as though his brain was groping for understanding. I was reminded of the poor wretch who had cried out “Where am I?” in that brief period when he was neither man nor corpse.

  I snapped my fingers in Holmes’s face, trying to bring him out of his apparent daze.“Holmes!” I called out to him. Seizing shoulders, I shook him. “Holmes, you have come back from the brink of eternity! What have you to say?”

  A light leapt into Sherlock Holmes’s eyes, and a calmness came over his agitated face. He looked to Herbert West, and lips like parchment seemed to compress into a smile. “Congratulations, Dr West. Apparently success is yours. You have my unbounded admiration.”